Astronomers switch on dark energy camera for the first time

The search for an explanation on the rapid expansion of the universe has begun in earnest as the world?s most powerful astronomical camera has come online and has captured its first series of images.

Part of the Dark Energy Survey (DES), the new high-powered imaging device is capable of gathering visual information from deep space in an effort to understand why the expansion of the universe is accelerating rather than slowing down. The image posted above is one of the composite images built from the 62 charged-coupled-devices that make up the two-foot wide lens of the device.

Mounted on the Victor M. Blanco telescope installed at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, the dark energy camera is scheduled to scan over 300 million different galaxies over a five-year period in search of clues to help scientists understand the mysterious substance that is thought to make up 70% of the known universe.

The 570-million-pixel camera isn?t the world highest-resolution imaging device, but with its far reaching capability it is certainly the most powerful. The idea is to scan one-eighth of the night sky over the scheduled period, then examine the findings to be able to compare the?characteristics?of the motion of different galaxies.

The reason for the search is due to a discovery made by two teams of astronomers back in 1998 that were studying some distant stars that had gone supernova. They were startled to find that the systems in question were actually speeding up as they?traveled?away from Earth, rather than slowing down as Einstein?s theory of relativity would suggest. This discovery shook up what we knew about the universe, and brought about the question of whether or not some sort of energy exists that behaves different than what we have witnessed before.

While the dark energy camera is currently capturing images in a testing phase, it will be put into full operation this December. Each image that it captures will contain an area of the sky twenty-times larger than the area of the full moon, making it capable of creating a very large map of the sky over time.

Read more at the Dark Energy Survey site, via the BBC

Source: http://www.geek.com/articles/geek-cetera/astronomers-switch-on-dark-energy-camera-for-the-first-time-20120922/

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